Author: Tobias Powalowski

# Archboot Release Homepage

- Those files are no official Arch Linux releases.

- Use them on your own risk.

# News:

2010.07 „2k10-R5“

Bugfix release for 2010.07 files, with many new setup features.

GENERAL:

- kernel 2.6.34.1 / LTS kernel 2.6.32.16

- pacman 3.4.0 usage

- RAM recommendations: 320 MB

Kernel changes:

- bump to latest .34 series and bump lts to .32 series

Environment changes:

- Change to isolinux menu on boot

- Added more isolinux features on boot menu

- intel wireless now provided out of the box

setup changes:

- added btrfs support

- added extlinux bootloader support

- added label namescheme support

- add automatic hostname to hosts file

- better automatic activation of complex devices like lvm,raid, dmraid.

- better support for cciss, ida, rd and mmcblk devices

- fixed grub2 install issues on lvm devices

- a lot of internal function cleanup

hwdetect changes:

- added btrfs support

quickinst changes:

- fixed media installation

# Latest Releases:

- Hybrid image file and torrent is provided, which include i686 and x86_64 core repository.

- Please read the according Changelog files for RAM limitations.

- Please check md5sum before using it.

- 2010.07 „2k10-R5“ / Changelog / Forum thread

- 2010.05 „2k10-R4“ / Changelog / Forum thread

# Burning Release:

Hybrid image file is a standard CD-burnable image and also a raw disk image.

- Can be burned to CD(RW) media using most CD-burning utilities.

- Can be raw-written to a drive using 'dd' or similar utilities. This method is intended for use with USB thumb drives.

'dd if=<imagefile> of=/dev/<yourdevice> bs=1M'

# History:

History of old releases can be found here.

# Known Issues and limitations:

- Release specific known issues and workarounds are posted in changelog files.

- dmraid might be broken on some boards, support is not perfect here.

The reason is there are so many different hardware components out there.

At the moment 1.0.0rc16 is included, with latest fedora patchset.

- grub cannot detect correct bios boot order:

It may happen that hd(x,x) entries are not correct, thus first reboot may not work.

Reason: grub cannot detect bios boot order.

Fix:

Either change bios boot order or change menu.lst to correct entries after successful boot.

This cannot be fixed it's a restriction in grub!

# What is the difference to the official install media (latest version)?

- It runs a modified Arch Linux system in initramfs.

- It is restricted to RAM usage, everything which is not necessary like

man pages etc. is not provided.

- LTS kernel boot images are provided

- Initial module loading and hardware detection is done by the hwdetect script.

- It doesn't mount anything during boot process.

- It uses a different setup script.

# Setup features (latest version):

- CD/USB/OTHER and FTP/HTTP installation mode

- Changing keymap and consolefont

- Changing time and date

- Preparing harddisk, like auto-prepare, partitioning ,

GUID (gpt) support etc.

- Creation of software raid/raid partitions, lvm2 devices and

luks encrypted devices

- Supports standard linux,raid/raid_partitions,dmraid,lvm2 and encrypted devices

- Filesystem support: ext2/3/4, btrfs, reiserfs,xfs,jfs,ntfs-3g,vfat

- Package selection support

- Autoaddition of usefull packages, like ntfs-3g etc.

- LTS kernel support

- Auto/Preconfiguration of fstab, mkinitcpio.conf, rc.conf,

crypttab and mdadm.conf

- Auto/Preconfiguration of KMS/framebuffers

- Configuration of basic system files

- Setting root password

- grub, grub2, lilo,extlinux and syslinux bootloader support

# Bugs:

- Please mail tpowa

- Arch Linux Bugtracker

# What is archboot?

- Archboot is a set of scripts to generate bootable media for CD/USB/PXE.

- It is designed for installation or rescue operation.

- It only runs in RAM, without any special filesystems like squashfs,

thus it is limited to the RAM which is installed in your system.

- pacman -S archboot

# Links:

- GIT repository

- Restore Usbstick

- Create image files

Have fun!

tpowa

(archboot developer)